SEO friendly XML sitemaps

Posted by picn1 on February 26, 2012

Creating SEO friendly XML sitemap’s is a lot easier to do now than in the past due to the popularity of automation tools that do it all for you. There should be no reason why you shouldn’t have one for your website. Essentially XML sitemap’s are a map of your website for search engine crawlers to go through and recognize. By knowing how your files are structured and what links to what, search engines will have an easier time to index all your entire website and thus gain visibility and traffic.

I recently attended a convention and spoke to a representative of an seo agency. What he told me was quite interesting. Websites with SEO friendly url’s and sitemaps tend to have a larger reach as they start gaining traffic for long tail keywords. On the other hand, websites that do not have those foundations in place tend to do poorly in attracting new visitors. Even worse is that some websites takes several weeks in order for new content to be recognized and indexed by major search engines.

Many content management systems have an automated script that automatically creates the XML sitemap but if your looking to do it yourself, here’s how you go about it:

Now that you have your sitemap, you can submit it to the various search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo so that they can crawl your site better. At the same time you should leave a copy of the sitemap in your websites root folder for the crawlers to pick up. And that’s it, your done! Your website can now be easily indexed.